It’s unfeasible to imagine ur-indie-actress Parker Posey leaving the East Village, just like it’s very wrong to think that cigar-mouthed banker John Gutfreund could leave Fifth Avenue, or that Jonathan Safran Foer might live anywhere besides a Park Slope brownstone. They’re each an enshrined embodiment of their little New York domain.
Because 38-year-old Ms. Posey so perfectly personifies the East Village’s hip foibles and its cheekiness and loveliness, it feels immensely inappropriate that, according to Halstead Property’s Web listings, her artsy three-room apartment in an 1845 brownstone on East 10th Street near Third Avenue is on the market.
Ms. Posey’s co-op, with a 15-foot skylight, a building’s worth of exposed brick, a wall of windows, a claw-foot tub, a working carved-marble fireplace and “exclusive use of the roof,” which sounds very Hollywood, will cost you $1.175 million.
But there’s already competition for the apartment. Three days after showings began earlier this month, an Observer reporter who happened to be in the neighborhood for a Vietnamese sandwich overheard a man saying that he and his boyfriend had put in a bid for Ms. Posey’s place.
But, take note: There’s still time to get the “excellent closet and Storage space and a washer/dryer” that belonged to the Village actress. According to the Halstead Web site, the place hasn’t gone to contract yet.
Why would she want to leave fellow East Village scenesters Chloë Sevigny and ex-Smashing Pumpkins lead guitarist James Iha—who happen to own co-ops in this townhouse, too? A source said Ms. Posey is looking for an apartment with a doorman.
Yet it’s been proven that at any given time at least three people in the neighborhood are watching Ms. Posey’s 1996 comedy Waiting for Guffman. She plays an ambitious Southern Dairy Queen girl who muses, “What New York really is, is it’s an island, with lots of people, lots of different people. … I hope to maybe meet some guys, some Italian guys, and maybe watch some TV.”
